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This is Design Exchange Magazine

If you’re a creative professional living in Saigon, then perhaps you’ve heard about dxSaigon or our design exchange series of events with such imaginative names as dx-1, dx-2, and dx-3? If not, then maybe you can join us for dx-4, participate in our facebook group, or just stay tuned in right here!

“We wanted a way to engage our community in an insightful way, more regularly.”

Our online community and our in-person events have always been about meeting great minds, getting inspired, and improving our craft by learning from creatives working in other industries or with other specialties. Social media is a great venue for sharing thoughtful content but it isn’t a good place to actually write it. Events are a great way to bring people together and to share deep content but it’s hard to do those more than a few times per year.

We wanted a way to engage our community in an insightful way, more regularly—a place to capture weekly inspirations and to craft and curate interviews with people making cool stuff. Thus dxMag, or Design Exchange Magazine, was born. We aim to bring quality content from Vietnam to the rest of the world and from the rest of the world to Vietnam. Please join us by subscribing to our rss feed, facebook page, youtube channel, twitter account, or contribute by writing for us.

Thanks for your support and we look forward to exchanging ideas with you!

About The Layout of This Site

We wanted a design that would let the reader focus on the content and that would look good at any resolution. Here are the key features of this initial version of the site:

persistent Nav Bar — No need to scroll back to the top of a long post to navigate to the rest of the site. By the way, we don’t have article for all of the topics or formats listed in the nav yet—we wanted to give you an idea of the scope that we’re aiming for.

Mobile Menu Icon — We used the now standard three line icon for mobile menus. There were a lot of other options out there but this was a must have feature. It’s pretty much used in every single mobile app now, so why isn’t it used in every mobile website?

Large Images — We want to show off beautiful design so we made the images as large as we reasonably could.

Responsive Design — we did our best to make our layout as beautiful and our text as readable for phones, tablets, and large desktop monitors.

dxPink — #FF0099; it’s a loud color, and we’ve used it all over the place to indicate links or your present location. It’s not an easy color to use tastefully, but I think we’ve pulled it off.

Site Roadmap

There are still a lot of things that we’d like to do to improve this site, but none of them are as important as getting this thing out the door and into your hands. Over the next year we’ll listen to your feedback and consider making improvements such as:

A Scrollable Drop Down Mobile Menu — We kind of lost the scrolling functionality when we made it persistent 🙁

A More Dense Main Page — Once we have a lot more content it may be nice to display more of it at once, and have a way to group posts together by category. Done

A Column Class — so that the text to the side of the large aligned left or right images stay in a column instead of wrapping around the image. That would add some nice white space and take care of edge cases where only one line wraps and looks ugly. Done

Better Social Integration — This stuff is always changing.

Better Layouts for Author and Archive Pages — Again, this is something that will become important once we have more content.

Retina Support — At least for the logo, but maybe for all of the images on the site; it will depend on how it affects the user experience in terms of mobile data use and download speeds.

Upload Videos from dx-1, dx-2, and dx-3 — The first three dx events were conceived solely as live events and were recorded only as a way to have a record. We’re a little embarrassed by the quality, especially of the audio, but when we get the time we plan on processing them as best we can and putting them up.

Multi-language — We’d love to have all of our content available in both English and Tiếng Việt. Other East Asian languages might make sense too. Done, we used Polylang.